CANNES — The rise of retail media is causing a “free-for-all” in the media dollars marketers are deploying as they seek to drive sales performance, says Ji Young Kim, Chief Operating Officer of GroupM.
“As retail media matures, brands are looking everywhere,” Kim says in this video interview with Beet.TV. “There’s a lot of pressure between brand dollars. These are keywords like ‘non-endemic’ and use of data, retail data for brand.
”There’s a bit of a Hunger Games in the dollars happening right now.”
Attribution Puts Pressure On Hard-To-Measure Channels
Any channel that has traditionally been harder to attribute is coming under pressure as marketers look to justify spending.
Kim says marketers should be running marketing mix modeling (MMM) studies on a monthly basis to determine which channels are truly moving the needle. “Whatever channels are not being measured is going to lose,” she warns.
GroupM is also starting to look more carefully at how paid media impacts and interacts with organic and non-paid channels. “One of the things that we have to start regularly including is how are non-paid media channels driving contribution,” Kim says.
Balancing Brand And Performance
But Kim cautions that, for many product categories, waiting until the point-of-sale to influence consumers through retail media is too late.
“There’s a lot of work that needs to happen before you even step into that store in order to influence somebody to consider me, think of me, am I relevant?” she says. “That’s why influencer is such a huge area. It’s the ultimate expression of ‘people like me’. It’s the most intimate expression of micro advertising.”
But even as marketers gain the ability to personalize ads through retail media platforms, Kim questions whether the industry has justified the incremental expense.
“I think our industry has yet to justify the cost of these things, the incremental cost of data, personalization,” she says.
Ultimately, Kim believes it is the consistency and relevance of a brand’s messaging that builds long-term equity and drives sales. “A short burst of really personalized and micro-targeted work is not going to move the needle as much as a very consistent experience that you’ve come to trust with a brand or a product.”
You’re watching coverage of Beet.TV’s Global Leadership Summit: Retail & Commerce Media, a Beet.TV Leadership Series at Cannes Lions 2024, presented by CMX, Criteo, LiveRamp & Snap. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
